First Wikileaks, now Facebook. Is this the death of privacy?

The parallels between the Wikileaks saga and the openness of Facebook's user
data are striking.

Founder and editor of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange, faces the media during a debate event,Photo: AP

By Milo Yiannopoulos

3:49PM BST 30 Jul 2010

I wrote a few days ago about an appalling misjudgment by Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, who released over 90,000 documents leaked to him relating to the war in Afghanistan. Well, it looks like another scandal is about to blow up. This time concerns personal privacy rather than national security – but the parallels are striking.

On Wednesday, Ron Bowes, a Canadian security consultant, “harvested” the names, profile addresses, and unique ID numbers of 100 million Facebook users – a fifth of the network’s total user base. He collated the information in a single 2.8GB file and posted it on BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Like Assange's Afghanistan dossier, it was immediately accessible to anyone with an internet connection – including corporations. Check out this list of the firms who have downloaded the database so far.

My name appears in Bowes' database. So does my mum’s. And so, probably, does yours, unless you're super-vigilant about your Facebook privacy settings. Because, though you might not be aware of it, chances are that certain elements of your Facebook profile are set to appear publicly.

It emerged on Wednesday afternoon that Bowes conducted this exercise to help him learn how to break passwords – very unsettling, I’m sure you’ll agree. But Bowes is not the villain in this piece, because his act of mischief – and we can’t call it more than that, because the information he collected was freely available to anyone who cared to search for it – was only possible because Facebook itself has repeatedly and shamelessly betrayed its users’ trust, instituting rollback after rollback of privacy settings. Finally, in May, Facebook listened to user complaints and simplified its privacy settings, requiring far less information to be public by default.

Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg have a great deal in common. Both sit at the helm of powerful organisations that use technology to disseminate massive amounts of sensitive data. Both have clear, and, to my mind, very unsettling, ideologies that are starting to define social norms on the internet.

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Assange is an outspoken opponent of the war in Afghanistan, which surely informed his decision to send the Afghanistan dossiers directly to Left-wing, anti-war newspapers rather than simply publish them on the site as had previously been Wikileaks' method of disseminating information.

And Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that he wants Facebook users to learn to embrace openness. “We decided that these would be the social norms now,” he once said about the growing trend for sharing information online.

Over the last year or so Facebook has repeatedly changed its privacy settings, on occasion changing users' previously private settings back to public and offering a bewilderingly complex array of settings. Even deleting one's account can be needlessly complicated. The update last May simplified things considerably but many users, including me, remain confused about what their privacy settings actually are. Given all the changes it would be fair for users to wonder how long it will be before the current settings are superseded and how the next set of rules will work.

Well, I’m sorry, but it isn’t for Mr Zuckerberg to decide what I choose to do with my private information. I want controls: easy to understand, easy to use controls that respect my privacy decisions permanently. And it’s not good enough to tell me: “Oh, well, you made that stuff public,” when the shifting sands of Facebook's privacy settings make it impossibly difficult for me to understand or keep track of who can see my stuff and how.

Remember, it isn’t just Facebook that uses Facebook’s data: advertisers are already able to “target” ad based on my age, location, gender and – distastefully – my sexual preferences. Now, you may not mind that and it's true that Facebook does not give advertisers access to identifiable data. You may even find targeted ads useful. But demographically targeted advertising is just the start. If we reach a point where pretty much all of Facebook’s data is available to be pulled via the Facebook API or “scraped” from search engine-friendly profiles, there will be no hiding from those who want to find out more about you.

And then there are the implications for people’s online reputations. In April, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington declared online reputation dead, in part thanks to the behaviour of social networks like Facebook that refuse to respect our wishes when it comes to privacy. “Twitter, Yelp, Facebook [...] are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access,” wrote Arrington.

We have arrived at a point in the internet’s history where we have to decide whether we care about our privacy and security or not. This week, both ordinary domestic privacy and the lives of troops in Afghanistan have been threatened by a mixture of technological drift and ideology. If we capitulate to the Web 2.0 ideologues now, we can look forward to a future in which our personal information, our contact details and our private photos and other content are considered fair game for companies to mine for profit and for other internet users to abuse. We will also be welcoming an era in which the blogosphere, hungry for “the truth”, will regularly risk national security and the lives of our troops in their mischievous quest to get one over on the government.

We should draw a line in the sand now. Otherwise, we will be complicit in hastening this new vision for the internet: one in which every embarrassing photograph and every indiscreet remark (including ones we thought we’d made privately, among friends) – not to mention everything other people have said about us – become permanently and publicly available. And they'll be searchable, too.

Tech blogs are already giving up. Just today, VentureBeat wrote that being private “increasingly means that you have to choose to drop out of society”. So don't look to the industry's thought leaders for inspiration. It's going to be up to us – the users of these services – to vote with our page impressions.